Have We Been Following the Wrong Calendar? Introducing the Human Era

The calendar is a dreadful object. It reminds us of schedules, appointments, and other matters of the day, month, or year that had to be done. But what if we're looking at it all wrong?

With 2017 around the corner, it may be time to take a step back and look at how we perceive the calendar in the first place.

According to Science Alert, it may be important to consider that calling next year as "2017" implies human history began not that long ago when in fact, humans have been around for much longer.

To be fair, humans thousands of years ago have been making advancements that provided the foundation of technologies we have today.

A video by Kurzgesagt looks into a "proposal" made by experts that we should start a new calendar next year. This means we have to get a calendar that goes beyond religion or culture to show the full scale of human achievement, beginning with a proper year zero.

But what marks a proper year zero? The video said there's an appropriate place to start the new calendar, which is the time when humans started changing the world around them. This takes us 12,000 years into the past with the creation of the "first" temple.

According to Smithsonian Magazine, the first temple is regarded as humanity's first large-scale construction project. This was built in Turkey using stone tools, but they created a structure that spans roughly 300 meters wide, with pillars weighing 40 tons.

A lot consider this a good place to start the story of human history since the ability to "terraform" the Earth has gotten more complex then.

According to the video, a scientist named Cesare Emiliani proposed in 1993 that it should be the start date of humanity's calendar, which is quite handy because it just needs us to add another 1 to the current date, making 2017 actually 12017.

This calendar is known as the Holocene Calendar, with an abbreviation HE, which also stands for Human Era. This makes holidays stay the same, the days of the week be the same, and the months be the same.

However, it can change the worldview we have of human history. We no longer have to view the antiquity of other eras the same way because the timeline we use to describe them is more encompassing than before.